


Her Oldest Friend

by Avee



Series: Random Bits [2]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Marauders' Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 12:10:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,532
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9323018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avee/pseuds/Avee
Summary: Lily Evans does not like Severus Snape's friends. She ignores it for years.





	

Lily Evans does not like Severus Snape's friends.

She decides early on that she will not hang out with Severus when he is with them. She never has to make a deal of it--Severus never tries to get her to hang out with them. He always catches up with her when they are not around. At first she thinks this is because he senses she does not like them, but soon she realizes it's because his friends would not want to be around her.

It does not take long for her to figure out what they think of people of her birth, and it does not take long for Severus's choice of friends to put a strain on their relationship.

She ignores it for years.

Ignores the fact that Severus doesn't fight the things his friends say about Muggleborns, ignores that he chooses to spend so much of his time with them, ignores that she hears from others that he calls people Mudbloods.

Perhaps he only does it to try to fit in with the others in his house, to not make himself an easy target.

They study together in the library, and go for walks around the grounds, and he is funny and supportive and smart. It's not that she doesn't see the negative things about him, it's that she also sees the good, and wants to help bring those out. It's that he was her first friend at Hogwarts, is her oldest friend since she lost contact with the Muggle girls from Cokeworth when she stopped going to school with them, is a part of both her worlds, Cokeworth and Hogwarts, in a way.

They brew potions together, and experiment to find more effective ways to make the potions than what their textbook says. They go to Slug Club meetings, which are a source of tension between the pair, as some other Slytherins are there, some of the ones that hate Muggleborns, that Severus considers friends, and Lily hates watching him try to walk the line between their group and her.

"I don't understand why you're friends with them," Lily tells him on more than one occasion, and he always finds some way to blow it off, to avoid the topic, some way to say they aren't as bad as people make them out, and what about Potter and Black?

She doesn't bring these things up when they're brewing. He's always so happy then.

"I just find him so frustrating sometimes," she tells Marlene one day in fifth year while they sit under a tree next to the lake.

"In what way?" Marlene asks after a moment.

"I know him, Mar. He's not like Mulciber and Avery and the others. I just…I don't get why he spends his time with them. And it's like he can't even see it. He can't even see what they're like."

"Maybe," Marlene says slowly, "there are multiple sides to Severus Snape. And you only see the one, and this evidence of the other doesn't fit that, and so you can't make sense of it."

"He's a good person, Marlene."

Marlene sighs, looks at Lily. "You know what I heard him say the other day? Not something that someone else told me he said. Something I overheard him say directly."

"What's that?"

"Avery was giving him shit for hanging around you. Blah, blah, 'she's not worth your time because of her blood' type of shit. And you know what he said?"

"What?"

"'She's not like the other Mudbloods.'"

Lily stays quiet.

"I know you see something in him, Lils. But what he said? That's not a defense of you. A guy who likes you despite your blood, who has to claim you as different from others of your birth to justify hanging out with you, is not someone who really respects you. I don't know what he really thinks. I don't know if he really believes all the blood purity shit he spouts around them. But that's what he spends most of his time saying. And he does nothing when his friends do crazy shit like what they did to Mary. He only acts differently when he's around you."

"Is that not a sign that I can save him?" Lily says quietly.

"You've known him for how long? You've known him since before he knew those guys. And still he says this. And still he hangs out with them. They're budding Death Eaters. Him right along with them. You know that right?"

Lily doesn't fight her, like she has in the past. She doesn't get up and leave. She has spent all her years at Hogwarts defending her friendship with Severus to her friends, but she's finding herself running out of defenses.

Lily and Severus keep brewing potions together, and going to Slug Club meetings, and walking around the grounds. Lily still tries to draw him away from his friends, to convince him to think differently. But she never hits quite directly on the topic, scared of what she'll hear. She guesses that she'd rather not think of that and just enjoy hanging out with him, laughing with him, he, her oldest friend.

"I need you to listen to me," she wants to scream at him. "I need you to take my concerns seriously, to not just blow me off. I need you to try to understand."

But she never says it. Never so directly. Because even that, she fears, will be one more thing he won’t listen to, and when he ignores her so plainly, what will be left for her to do?

Then he calls her 'Mudblood', and finally she has had enough.

She does not know how the confrontation with him and those stupid prats starts. She sits by the lake with Marlene and Mary, enjoying the end of that exam, enjoying the summer heat, enjoying swishing her bare feet in the water, when she hears the laughing and jeering and cursing and turns around to see the group of students watching something, their backs to her. She stands and walks toward them, a sinking feeling in her gut.

She sees Potter and Black, and she sees Severus choking on soap suds, and she does not need to see anymore.

"Leave him ALONE!"

Potter and Black turn to her, and Potter runs his hand through his hair, and Severus is struggling, helplessly, to move, still spitting soap from his mouth.

"All right, Evans?" Potter says, and Lily gets somehow angrier at his tone.

"Leave him alone. What's he done to you?"

"Well," Potter says, and he pretends to deliberate, because of course the git is still putting on a show for the idiots standing around watching. "It's more the fact that he exists, if you know what I mean…."

The onlookers laugh, and Lily could curse them all if she wasn't so focused on Potter.

"You think you're funny, but you're just an arrogant, bullying toerag, Potter. Leave him alone."

Lily notices Severus starting to move, starting to inch his way across the ground, and part of her cannot wait for him to be free, for ending this to not be all on her shoulders, and part of her worries about what Severus will do when he reaches his wand.

"I will if you go out with me, Evans," Potter says, and Lily snaps her eyes back to him. She cannot fathom what would compel him to ask her like this, and it makes her want to strangle him. "Go on…go out with me, and I'll never lay a wand on old Snivelly again."

She could answer him like she had the first time he asked her, back at the beginning of the year--a cool but polite no. But anger speaks for her, and really Potter deserves nothing polite.

"I wouldn't go out with you if it was a choice between you and the giant squid."

Hurt crosses Potter's face, but he hides it quickly, and Lily is glad.

"Bad luck, Prongs," Black says, using that stupid nickname, and Lily knows Black thinks this is all a joke, and she does not know how she doesn’t curse him. She looks to Remus, because she knows from their year as prefects together that he does not like this behavior, even if he never criticizes his friends directly, and she wants his help, but he keeps his nose in his book.

"OY!" Black yells, and Lily looks around in time to see the blood pour from Potter's face and Severus get yanked into the air by his ankle. The crowd cheers as Severus's robes fall up around his head, and Lily never put too much thought into what Severus wore beneath his robes, but she had not been expecting that, and she snaps her eyes away before she smiles, and she is angry at herself for the impulse and she is angrier at Potter for causing the situation.

"Let him down!"

"Certainly," Potter says, and Severus falls to the ground, and for a split second Lily thinks it might be over.

"Locomotor mortis!" Black says, and Severus falls over, rigid.

"Leave him alone!" Lily shouts and she draws her wand, because she's had more than enough. That, at least, gets Black and Potter's attention.

"Ah, Evans, don't make me hex you," Potter says.

Lily would like to see him try. "Take the curse off him, then."

Potter sighs as if she has asked the world of him, turns, and lifts the curse. Severus instantly climbs to his feet, a little unsteady. "There you go, you're lucky Evans was here, Snivellus--"

"I don't need help from filthy little Mudbloods like her," Severus says, and the world falls still for just a moment. Everything explodes in her chest and leaves a gaping hole in its place.

"Fine," she manages to say. "I won't bother in the future. And I'd wash your pants if I were you, Snivellus."

It is the only rude thing she will bring herself to say, and she will feel bad for it later, but now she is just angry, and wondering how she did not see this coming.

"Apologize to Evans!" Potter yells, and Lily cannot take it.

"I don't want you to make him apologize," she shouts. I don't want his apology, she thinks. "You're as bad as he is."

"What? I'd never call you a--you-know-what!"

He misses the point, and that makes Lily more angry, because none of this is just about the word, not really, that is only a part of it, and Lily is going off on him before she really realizes she's speaking.

"Messing up your hair because you think it looks cool to look like you've jut got off your broomstick, showing off with that stupid Snitch, walking down corridors and hexing anyone who annoys you just because you can--I'm surprised your broomstick can get off the ground with that fat head on it. You make me sick."

She turns and leaves, and she is nearly to the castle when she realizes she never put her shoes back on, and she is across the entrance hall when Mary and Marlene catch up with her, and she notices Mary carrying her white trainers and socks, and she doesn't stop to put them on, not yet.

Righteous anger propels her through the rest of that night, through Snape's groveling outside Gryffindor Tower. She tries to ignore it all as she finishes her OWLs but she keeps switching between being furious with him and furious with herself for putting up with his crap for so long, and feeling guilty for cutting him out of her life. She has abandoned her oldest friend because in a fit while being tormented he called her an ugly word? How could she have ever considered herself his friend if she would walk away from him so easily?

Mary turns red with anger when Lily voices these thoughts to her and Marlene.

"You walked away because of more than just that, and you know it," Marlene says.

"And you're also downplaying what happened," Mary adds.

Lily nods, and just like that she has switched back to being angry with the slimy-haired git.

Lily goes home for the summer, and she doesn't see or talk to Severus once. She writes Mary and Marlene, and they get together to hang out a few times, and Lily misses meeting up with Severus at the park with a packed lunch. She misses sitting under the trees and laughing and talking about nothing and everything.

But she comes to realize, they never really did talk about everything. They never spoke of the problems in Lily and Petunia's relationship, because Severus was always dismissive of Lily's sister. They never really spoke of the war they both know is brewing. Lily doesn't tell him when someone dismisses her because of her birth, or calls her names. She doesn't tell him of the frustration of being expected to understand things that people raised in the wizarding world have absorbed unconsciously since birth while simultaneously expecting her to not understand simple magical concepts. She doesn't tell him of how often people seem surprised that she is at the top of her class, as if it is unheard of for a Muggleborn to excel in magical studies.

Mostly she is happy. Happy to be with her friends who actually don't judge her because of her blood, happy to not have to wonder at Severus's true feelings, happy for there to not be an undercurrent of shame about her birth in the conversations with people who call her their friend.

When they go back to Hogwarts, Severus still hangs out with his Death Eater friends. He does not try to talk to her, and part of Lily is glad for that, even if another part of her is sad and slightly annoyed. But she doesn't want to be liked despite her birth. She doesn't want to have to be different from other Muggleborns to be worthwhile.

She almost stops going to the Slug Club, because isn't that more of the same? Severus and his Death Eater friends, and her being one of the only Muggleborns included? But she keeps going, because it will look good on her resume. Because maybe it's giving her connections that will help her later in life. Because she doesn't want to disappoint Professor Slughorn, because she likes him and she does like potions.

Despite it all, she is never rude to Severus. More distant, perhaps. Less friendly. But never rude. Never unkind. Despite it all, she still sees the lonely boy, the funny boy, who is nice, and smart, and was the first to tell her about magic. Sometimes she wants to vomit with anger when she sees what Severus does with his friends. Sometimes she cries when she sees what he is becoming.

Part of her, she thinks, will always feel guilty for not saving him. Part of her will always be angry at him for not saving himself. She can picture herself, when she is old and grey and sitting in a rocking chair, still thinking back on him, her oldest friend.


End file.
